She caught Ander’s eyes and saw guilt widen them. He inhaled sharply, as if to take it back. When he realized that he couldn’t, he lunged for her.
Their fingertips touched for an instant. Then the wave slid over them and swelled toward land. Eureka was flung backward, spiraling away from Ander into the battering sea.
Water shot up her nose, crashed against her skull, bashed her neck from side to side. She tasted blood and salt. She didn’t recognize the waterlogged moan coming from her mouth. She fell out of the wave as the water dropped out from under her. For a moment she was running on a path of sky. She couldn’t see anything. She expected to die. She screamed for her family, for Cat, for Ander.
When she landed on the rock the only thing that told her she was still, ridiculously, alive was the echo of her voice against the cold, incessant rain.
3
THE LOST SEEDBEARER
In the central chamber of his subterranean grotto Solon took a sip of tar-thick Turkish coffee and frowned.
“It’s cold.”
His assistant Filiz reached for the ceramic mug. Her mother had cast it specially for Solon on her wheel, had baked it in her kiln two caves to the east. The mug was an inch thick, designed to hold heat longer in Solon’s porous travertine cave, which sat in the constant clutches of a bone-deep chill.
Filiz was sixteen, with wavy untamed hair she dyed a fiery shade of orange and eyes the color of a coconut husk. She wore a tight, electric-blue T-shirt, black tapered jeans, and a choker studded with short silver spikes.
“It was hot when I brewed it an hour ago.” Filiz had been working for the eccentric recluse for two years and had learned to navigate his moods. “The fire’s still going. I’ll make more—”
“Never mind!” Solon flung his head back and poured the coffee down his throat. He gagged melodramatically and wiped his mouth with a pale arm. “Your coffee is only slightly worse when it’s cold, like being transferred from Alcatraz to Siberia.”
Behind Solon, Basil snickered. Solon’s second assistant was nineteen, tall and swarthy, with slick black hair combed into a ponytail and an impish twinkle in his eyes. Basil wasn’t like the other boys in their community. He listened to old country music, not electronica. He idolized the graffiti artist Banksy and had painted several of the nearby rock formations with colorfully distorted superheroes. He thought he had done the graffiti anonymously, but Filiz knew he was the artist. He liked to show off his English by speaking in proverbs, but he never translated them right. Solon had taken to calling him “the Poet.”
“You can lead a horse to water, but your coffee tastes like poop,” the Poet said, chuckling into Filiz’s glare.
The Poet and Filiz looked older than their boss, whose pale and sculpted face was as smooth as a child’s. Solon appeared to be about fifteen, but he was far older than that. He had searing blue eyes and shorn blond hair dyed with black and brown leopard-print spots. He stood over a silver robot that lay on a long wooden table.
The robot’s name was Ovid. He was five foot eleven, with enviable human proportions, a handsome face, and the blank stare of a Greek statue. Filiz had never seen anything like him and had no idea where he had come from. He was composed completely of orichalcum, a metal neither the Poet nor Filiz had heard of before, but which Solon insisted was priceless and rare.
Ovid was broken. Solon spent long days trying to resurrect him but would not tell Filiz why. Solon was full of secrets that straddled the border between magic and lies. He was the kind of crazy that made life interesting, and dangerous.